Category: review
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2025 Diamine Inkvent Teal – Day 21-25
At the time that I’m preparing this post (a week in advance), we’re still waiting on moving company nonsense, my internet keeps cutting out while I’m trying to do stuff, the furnace still doesn’t work, and the work training I took today got glitched somehow so I can’t finish it and I’m stuck re-listening to…
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2025 Diamine Inkvent Teal – Day 13-16
Another belated Inkvent post for swatch Wednesday! I didn’t bother doing inkvent posts in December because of the move, and in theory now that some of our stuff has arrived I could probably be unpacking instead of blogging about ink. But our stuff got separated into two shipments and a lot of the furniture is…
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Campus vs Traveler’s blank monthly calendars (size comparison)
It’s time to bid farewell to last year’s calendar, and set up a fresh one! I’m moving from the Traveler’s Notebook free monthly calendar to the KOKUYO Campus one, mostly because the latter is a bit bigger. (Spoiler: the squares are about 18% bigger.)
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Books & board games for May 25, 2025
Trying something new: I haven’t been reviewing books because it takes a long time to write reviews on my phone, and I’d been working on reducing my phone screen time. But I’ve been using my computer more to write fanfic so I’m going to see if weekly book posts are more likely to happen now…
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How is my new journal setup working for me?
I’m already 2/3 of the way through my current journal! I blame fountain pens and have some thoughts about what’s working and what needs adjustment.
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Shark Pen!
It’s a fountain pen shaped like a shark! It’s made by Jinhao, who are known for making cheap but often decent fountain pens. It sounds like not all of their pens are winners because quality control isn’t great but if you’re willing to roll the dice and don’t mind that the design may be a…
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A trip to Oblation Papers
I had a little bit of solo time on my way home from BSidesPDX in October, so I stopped by Oblation Papers. I couldn’t remember if I’d ever visited before — maybe once when I was visiting before we moved to the area? Anyhow, it’s very pretty: I mostly went to look around, but I…
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Best practices in practice: pre-commit
Continuing in my “best practices in practice series” : today’s tool is `pre-commit`. Using pre-commit takes a bunch of failure points out of our code quality and security process, and I highly recommend it.
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Unconventional travel fountain pens: Pilot Kakuno & Platinum Preppy Wa
It was likely inevitable that I’d start thinking seriously about having some travel-specific fountain pens. I’m no longer the world traveller I was in my 20s when writing papers and going to conferences to present them was a key part of my job, but I have a certain amount of travel-specific stuff in my life.…
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Glow Pen! TWSBI Eco (Medium)
I bought a glowing pen to replace my finicky first pen. Plus some musing on how the glowing definitely makes the pen work better for me; science agrees!
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Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen
I picked this pen up at the same time as my TWSBI pens (Making this pen 5 in my collection), with a similar vision in mind: trying the big stub nibs. This one sports a CM / Italic / 1.0mm stub. My first impression upon getting the pen was overwhelmingly positive: this is a solidly…
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TWSBI ECO-T and TWSBI Swipe Fountain Pens
After a few months of using my mystery wood pen and the Pilot Varsity that I picked up when I bought ink for the first pen, I decided I was clearly having enough fun that I should add a few more pens to my collection. So pen number 3 and 4 were a pair of…